Fascinating, outrageous, factual saga of America's powerful beer barons—the Busch family of St. Louis. Adolphus Busch—wine connoisseur and scorner of his flagship beer, Budweiser (``Ach, dot schlop?''), battler of Prohibition and shrewd judge of human nature (``Another bad trait in the American's character is hypocrisy. He recommends...prohibition...while at the same time drinks like a fish and becomes drunk as a fool''), influence purchaser (Pres. Taft rewarded Busch's campaign-help by appointing Busch's personal lawyer secretary of commerce)—arrived in St. Louis from Germany in 1857. By his death, he had founded a family dynasty that today has the lion's share of the US beer market (and a CEO earning $22 million in 1988). With more than 200 interviews and several thousand pages of public and private documents, Hernon and Ganey (special projects reporter and state capital bureau chief, respectively, for the St. Louis Post Dispatch) show how the succeeding five generations of this family made enough connections—Adolph Hitler; Al Capone; Presidents Taft, T. Roosevelt, FDR, Truman—and created enough scandals—drug addiction, alcoholism, illegitimate children, ear-ripping assault, murder over homosexual liaison—to dwarf the peccadilloes of the Kennedys. And all this while keeping the cork in the bottle! The authors had difficulty gaining access to the current chief—August R. Busch—whose principal bogeyman is what he calls the ``neoprohibitionist'' movement. Busch, it seems, has good reasons to fear probing. For example, during the 60's, Anheuser-Busch hired a team at the Univ. of Penn.'s Wharton School to study drinking behavior. The result was a profile of four types of drinkers, two of which drank to escape personal or social failure. The advertising then zeroed in on these ``target market segments'' with splendid success. Adroitly told, fresh, provocative, with plenty of froth and also substance; certain to excite comment. (Thirty-two pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: June 24, 1991
ISBN: 0-671-69024-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1991
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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